Cult Romanian pianist Radu Lupu has always tended to pack houses and the Festival Hall was predictably heaving for his performance of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto with the London Philharmonic and Jukka-Pekka Saraste. In the event, it proved not to be quite the great occasion one hoped for: the result, one suspects, of differences in temperament and approach between the two men. Both are remarkable artists, but the sense of probing, serene wisdom that Lupu generates in performance sits uneasily with Saraste's fondness for rhetoric and heightened drama.

All this made for an occasionally unsteady account of the Emperor, the first movement above all. There were disparities of tone and mood. The force with which Saraste and the LPO flung out the opening chord seemed very distant from Lupu's questioning, undemonstrative treatment of the piano's initial flourishes. What followed felt, at times, not so much like a superbly wrought musical argument as a process of negotiation for emotional unity that only reached some sort of accord in the approach to the recapitulation. From that point onward you couldn't fault it, however, and the slow movement, in particular, was superb in its combination of poetry and grace.

Those who had come solely to hear Lupu left during the interval, thereby missing the fine performance of Brahms's First Symphony that followed. Saraste's way with Brahms is bracingly assertive without lapsing into over-emphatic starkness, so that emotional resonance and formality of shape and structure are held in perfect balance. The tragic statement of the first movement was offset by a striking and unusually calm performance of the finale, while the inner movements gave us introversion and elation in equal measure. It was beautifully played, too.